Closing Doors: The Last Marla Mason Novel

by T. A. Pratt

  Still, Big B had given him a line of inquiry. Why would anyone want to kill him in particular? This wasn’t a situation where Bradley was no one special, so why would anyone want to kill him? He was someone really special, in several different ways. He was from another branch of the multiverse, so that was weird. The version of him from this reality had been a mildly famous movie star who’d had had a very public crash into addiction and obscurity before vanishing from sight; that version of him had died, but the new Bradley had moved into his life and identity easily enough, and shared 99.9% of his memories and experiences, being from a very similar reality. He was one of the most powerful psychics on the planet, and a supernatural catalyst who increased the power of magic in his immediate vicinity, and he also had the rare power of oracle generation. He was the former apprentice of the current god of Death, and the—little brother? Little toe?—of a meta-god who ruled the multiverse. There were a lot of reasons people might want to kill him, so he just had to figure out which one was in play.

  Who could be targeting him? A crazed fan of his movies who also happened to be a sorcerer? Someone with a vendetta against Marla? Someone who wanted to get the attention of the ruler of the multiverse? Any of those were possible, and none of them struck him as more plausible than another. But if Sanford Cole, master of divination, couldn’t track down any information about the assassin, they were very good at staying hidden.

  Big B had also said “Maybe check on—” before he thought better of it, which meant someone else was in danger. Marla? She was fully a god now, and while there were things that could kill gods, there weren’t many of them, and she was as tough as they came. So who else was in danger? Marzi? Cole? Rondeau? Sierra? He didn’t have that many close associates.

  If he was loath to pester Big B, he was almost as reluctant to bother Marla, and it was hard to reach the Queen of Hell anyway. Cole did have a direct line to her at the moment, since he was helping her with Project Consort. Bradley decided he should at least reach out to her and let her know something was going on. Maybe she could spare a moment of her godly attention to look into the situation. If nothing else, she could have one of her demons question the soul of the shark-man who’d had his head filled with sand... unless he’d been an atheist and vanished into oblivion when he died instead of finding a place in the afterlife.

  He peed, washed his hands, and went into the hallway. His phone buzzed in his pocket, and when he looked at the screen, the number read “(457) 457-457,” which, of course, wasn’t a real number at all, and struck him as sinister besides—wasn’t there some numerological significance to those three digits? He should have paid more attention during his omen and auspices lessons. “Hello?” he said.

  “I need you,” Marla said.

  Flesh Is Grass

  “What do you mean he’s dead?” Marla stalked forward, hands clenched into fists, as she scanned the entirety of her underworld in an instant. “The dead are my wheelhouse, Pelham. I’d know if he were dead.”

  Pelham nodded. “Yes, of course, but what I mean is, his body is dead. Given Rondeau’s... peculiarities... it is understandable that his soul, if he even has such a thing, has not arrived here.”

  Marla scowled. Pelham was right. Rondeau wasn’t human. He was a psychic parasite, inhabiting the body of this universe’s original Bradley Bowman, cloaked in a permanent illusion that made it look like Rondeau’s old body, which had died from a gunshot fired by Marla’s brother Jason’s partner in crime. (Sometimes, when she took a step back and reflected, it struck her that her life was extremely weird, and had been even before she became a god.) “If his body is dead, and the spell he commissioned to keep from stealing another host worked....” Marla shook her head. “Rondeau’s mind is just buzzing around in there, stuck in the corpse like a bug in a jar, right?”

  “That is my fear,” Pelham said.

  “How do you know his body died? If there’s no soul to come to hell, how did you find out?”

  Pelham coughed. “I... worry about Rondeau. We were close friends, and roommates, before my death, and I helped make sure he took care of himself. I have looked in on him, from time to time. Today he was visiting his, ah, spawn? The Pit Boss. I was particularly concerned about their growing relationship, given their past hostilities, and so looked in on them to allay my fears. I saw Rondeau slain by a server in the dining room of the Pit Boss’s secret casino.”

  “Looked in on them how? Hell doesn’t have nanny-cams on Earth.”

  Pelham looked down, sheepish. “You granted me a portion of your powers in order to allow me to better administer the underworld during your quest for a consort. I took the liberty of using the deadsight.”

  Marla nodded as understanding dawned. She was the death of everything that lived on Earth, and a part of her was there whenever any creature died, and lingered for a bit with the remains—which meant there was a bit of her consciousness almost everywhere on the planet. Pelham had tapped into that network, and looked upon the world: deadsight. “So, what, you spied on Rondeau through the eyes of his shrimp cocktail?”

  “An ortolan, at first, until Rondeau swallowed it.”

  Marla wrinkled her nose. “Gross.”

  Pelham shrugged. “Everything was very confused—by the end I was looking at the dining room from the point of view of a bit of wilted parsley on a forgotten plate—but a waitress entered, and lifted the lid from a tray, and a pelesit attacked Rondeau.”

  “Those are the... vampire cricket things?”

  “The very same. The Pit Boss killed the pelesit, but then the waitress stabbed Rondeau in the neck, and that... more direct approach worked where magical trickery failed. I watched Rondeau die on the floor, and then returned here, and waited for you.”

  “How long ago was this?”

  “Not long, as time passes on Earth. Ten or fifteen minutes, no more.”

  “I’m going up there.”

  “In your... true form?”

  “I... damn it, yes. I want my full range of powers. I might need them all to save him. I won’t be there long.” She waved a hand, making half the lights in the office go dim, creating a wealth of shadows, and stepped through the nearest one.

  She’d been to the secret casino, the hidden heart of Las Vegas’s magical underworld, before, most recently when the Pit Boss thought he could exile Rondeau. She’d convinced the Pit Boss to reconsider his rash action, and put a healthy fear of demi-god into him. Now that she was a full god, the Pit Boss would piss himself at the sight of her. Did he even piss? He ate and drank, so maybe. Probably he pissed magma, though.

  The casino was bustling, full of humans of most ethnicities and a couple of stranger creatures, including a walking assemblage of twigs, and a towering figure wrapped head-to-toe in stained bandages, like a badly embalmed mummy. The décor was all dark wood and red velvet and shining chrome—what passed for elegance in the capital city of American luck magic. The customers were playing all the usual games of chance, along with more outré ones: several people stared rapt at an aquarium as an eel hunted fish with numbers painted on their sides, and one old woman in a red evening gown had her hand strapped to a chopping block while a bored-looking dealer stood by with a cleaver, ready to take the forfeit of the bettor’s fingers if the turn of the cards didn’t go her way. A man in a tuxedo plunged his head into a barrel of water while a casino employee kept his eye on a stopwatch.

  There were games of death here, and so she felt at home. No one noticed her arrival, because she didn’t want them to, but there was a hubbub when she passed anyway, as improbably good and bad luck followed her with every step, cries of delight and dismay echoing around her. Even without Rondeau’s presence to amplify her divinity, she couldn’t help but twist the world in her wake, and she hurried in hopes of avoiding any permanent damage.

  She walked unnoticed past a pair of broad-shouldered enforcers (one was something like a minotaur, but with the head of a hippopotamus instead of a bull; she’d never seen one o
f those before, and wondered if it was properly mythic or just made by magic), to the invisible door that led to the Pit Boss’s private rooms.

  His office was empty, and his sitting room, but there in the formal dining room, she found Rondeau: a corpse on the floor, in a puddle of blood, eyes staring blankly. There was something worse wrong with him, though: his body was rotting, far faster than it should have, skin sinking in on itself before her eyes. He was deliquescing. The pelesit had most likely bitten him, or spread some other killing venom, before the Pit Boss managed to kill it. Where was the Pit Boss? And, for that matter, where was the waitress who’d wielded the knife? Marla had questions for her.

  She sensed no residue of life in Rondeau at all, but his essential self could still be trapped in that cooling heap of meat, even if she couldn’t discern it. His life and death were not hers to guide or witness. She’d long suspected that Rondeau was truly other—that he had slipped through a crack from another universe, the way her old purple-and-white cloak had, or the Outsider. Those other beings from beyond this universe had been vile, but Rondeau had been good, or he’d tried to be.

  “He is good,” she muttered.

  “Good and dead,” a slurred voice said from under the table.

  She ducked down, lifted the tablecloth, and stared at the mess underneath. The Pit Boss was there... but much diminished. The last time she’d seen him, he’d topped eight feet in height, a massive horned creature made of burning rock, covered in veins of lava, an anthropomorphic volcano gifted with wit and sarcasm. Now he was melted, a puddle of cooling stone with the vestiges of a face floating still fluid on top, and a croaking mouth.

  “Oh, shit,” she said. “Rondeau made you.”

  “I guess his magic was the thing sustaining me after all. And here I thought I was independent.” The Pit Boss’s voice was waning and low. “Will you avenge him? My father?”

  “I’ll do better than that. I’ll save him.” She paused. “But... I don’t think I can save you. The magic Rondeau used to bring you into life, it was the magic of that body, that brain, and that body isn’t going to be habitable for much longer.”

  The Pit Boss grunted. “Of course. My father can take on a new form. Lucky bastard. Do you need a body for him? There are some people who owe me their bodies, and more. I can get one for you.” The puddle moved, the face lifting up on the contour of a head, and then slumped down again. “I can probably assert enough physicality to give orders... if anyone would take orders from a dying boss. Which I guess they wouldn’t.”

  “It’s okay. I’ll manage.”

  “Right. You’re Death. Bodies are your department.”

  Sort of, but Rondeau needed a living host, not a fresh corpse. Maybe she could find some brain-dead person somewhere... would that work? “Can you tell me what happened?” she said.

  “Before I cool off? Ha. Sure. We were having a nice dinner, and then one of my waitresses went crazy, released a weird demon-bug, and then stabbed Rondeau in the neck. She didn’t take much interest in me. The hit was meant for Rondeau alone.”

  “Did the waitress say anything?”

  “What, like ‘sic semper tyrannis’? No. She didn’t speak. She honestly seemed kind of robot-like, maybe drugged or something. I never would have pegged her for an assassin. I hired her myself. Nice girl, kinky for satyrs, so she fit in here well.” His mouth was moving more slowly now as his medium cooled and became less liquid. “Crap. Do you think she was mind controlled?” The rock hardening around the corners of his mouth cracked as he spoke.

  “Tell me where she is, and I can probably find out.”

  “She’s in hell. Well, no, not your hell.” He tried to chuckle, making a bubble form and pop in the ever-less-molten rock. “You know how I have the ability to open a portal to this sort of tiny pocket space, like a wizard’s sanctum? Except there’s nothing in there but the pool of lava at the heart of a volcano. I dropped her into that. She’s gone. Burned up.”

  Marla sighed. She couldn’t blame the Pit Boss, really, but it was inconvenient. Maybe the waitress’s soul was in her realm. She could check later. “Do you want to go to that place? If you drop yourself into the lava, you might live on.”

  “That’s the place where I came from. I didn’t mind that life before. I was just living fire, and the passage of time didn’t matter to me. I didn’t know any better. Then Rondeau... my father... he gave me life. Now I know about steak, and dancing, and cigars, and music, and slapstick, and revenge. I couldn’t be happy in that place now, with nothing but heat and time to keep me company, because now I know about time. Better to just....” His mouth worked, then stopped moving, and he was frozen, entirely cool, just a puddle of rock with the suggestion of a face scratched into it.

  Marla rose and returned to Rondeau. His skin was greenish and sagging, and she could see parts of his skull and cheekbone. It was, in a way, easier to look at him this way than it had been when he was alive. Since becoming a god, Marla had been immune to illusions, so she’d seen through his magical disguise. To her, Rondeau always looked like her old friend and apprentice Bradley—the original one. The new Bradley was wonderful, and sometimes she could pretend to forget he wasn’t really her B, but when she saw Rondeau, she always remembered. If she could save him, he’d be in a new body, and he wouldn’t have to walk around wearing a suit of living guilt, a reminder of his most terrible mistake. Ideally his new body wouldn’t have such potent psychic powers, either. Those had never brought Rondeau much but trouble.

  “Are you in there, buddy?” There was no answer, and Marla didn’t possess any powers that would let her communicate with psychic parasites. She could talk to the living, and to the dead, but Rondeau wasn’t either one, exactly. Marla had a host of powers as a god, but she was at a loss about what to do next. She could make Rondeau’s body stand up and walk, and stop it from decaying further, but the body was already pretty far gone, and Rondeau liked the pleasures of the flesh too much to enjoy being a zombie, or even a lich. He probably needed a living host, anyway—if he could control corpses, he’d be moving this one around. She couldn’t even ask Rondeau what he wanted her to do. She wasn’t even completely sure he was still in there—maybe spending ten minutes without a body made him die for real. Maybe his essential parasitic self couldn’t survive for long without a living human host. There was so much she didn’t know—

  But someone might. She knelt and scooped up Rondeau’s body, holding its loosening and dissolving parts together with the force of will, then stepped with the corpse through a shadow into hell. She was aware that she was leaving behind a pretty big mess: there would be a power vacuum and a resulting war of succession in Vegas when the Pit Boss’s corpse-puddle was discovered. Once upon a time, instability in the sorcerous underworld would have been a big concern for her, but it was way outside her purview now. Things in Vegas would sort themselves out, probably in bloody fashion.

  She stepped into her throne room, where a bier waited. She put Rondeau on the black stone pedestal, then summoned a crystal coffin around it, mostly to hold in the smell. Pelham bustled in, looked at Rondeau’s rotting visage, and gasped. “Oh, no, my friend. What shall we do, Majesty?”

  “First, I need to find out if there’s anything I can do. I’ll be back.” She scanned the world of the living, found two lives in close proximity—in Philadelphia, city of brotherly love, that was sort of funny—and stepped through a shadow. She really shouldn’t be storming around the world in her true form anymore, but she was annoyed.

  Marla emerged into the dimness of a pool hall. There were broken chairs and overturned barstools and shattered liquor bottles everywhere, but no dead bodies. Whatever brawl had happened here had moved on... or the consequences had been disposed of. There were two people in the room, though, if you used the term “people” loosely: Squat and Crapsey.

  Squat was a short, broad thug, cursed years ago to become so ugly that no one could stand to be in his presence, and as a result he was variously muta
ted, and he smelled terrible. He was also inhumanly strong, and possibly immortal, which made him a valuable henchman. He’d worked for Marla for a while, until defecting to Nicolette, and now he was working for Perren River, doing dirty jobs. His improbable buddy was Crapsey, a version of Rondeau from an adjacent universe, where instead of being a happy-go-lucky nightclub owner, he’d been the enslaved assassin of a world-conquering monster, forced to take over hundreds of bodies at his mistress’s order, sending countless souls to oblivion. Crapsey hadn’t been born a psychopath, but years of trauma had made him into the equivalent, and he’d been Marla’s frequent enemy since he got stranded in this branch of the multiverse. Crapsey was a natural best friend for Squat, because he’d spent years in the close company of an unimaginably vile monster who’d dominated him utterly. A little curse of disgustingness didn’t even phase him.

  “Oh, shit, it’s Marla.” Squat lifted up his pool cue, then lowered it. “I guess it would be stupid to fight you. You’re a god now and stuff.”

  “Shut up, traitor. I’m here to talk to the other one.”

  “I’m a traitor, too.” Crapsey was not as upset to see her as Squat was. He was hard to frighten or intimidate: he’d been frightened and intimidated by the best, after all. He lined up a shot, took it, and missed. Marla was pretty sure her probability-warping presence had screwed up his shot. He sighed. “What can I do for you? By which I mean, what can I do to make you go away?”

  “Rondeau’s host body is dead.”

  “Ha! Good.” Crapsey wasn’t fond of Rondeau... because Rondeau had arranged for Crapsey to fall victim to the same spell Rondeau had used on himself, trapping Crapsey’s parasitic consciousness in his current body. Given Crapsey’s history of snatching bodies at will, it was a good precaution to take, but Crapsey had been understandably bothered by it.

  Marla took a step closer to him, letting a little of her divinity leak out, making her eyes glow with white light. “I want to get Rondeau a new body, but first I need to know—how long can your kind survive without a host?”